Translated material
The Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the FSB will check the parties of Russia
The Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the FSB of Russia in connection with the Duma elections in 2007 will conduct a total check of all Russian political parties. The verification will be carried out from January 1, 2006, when the law will come into force, raising the threshold for the number of parties from 10,000 to 50,000 people. Some experts believe that the authorities are taking these measures in order to radically reduce the number of political parties in Russia.
Those parties that, for various reasons, did not have time to collect the required number of members, will be asked to either stop their activities or re-register as a public organization. The task of the Ministry of Justice as a controlling body in this case should be to verify how the number of members declared by the party corresponds to reality.
In addition, visiting commissions will call in rank-and-file members of the Party for interviews. According to State Duma deputy Sergei Glotov from the Motherland faction, officials will ask party members a variety of questions. “Based on the results of such conversations, a conclusion will be made whether the person is really a member of the party, and if not, then the question will arise, what is the size of this party in fact,” Glotov revealed the technology of such conversations. Moreover, it is possible that some of the questions will be devoted to the Party member's knowledge of the program documents and the charter of the organization.
However, such an initiative of the Ministry of Justice, if it is implemented in practice, contradicts a whole list of provisions of the Constitution. Thus, such surveys of ordinary party members will mean an invasion of a person's private life without his consent, which contradicts Article 24, paragraph 1, of the country's fundamental law. In addition, Article 29, paragraphs 1, 3 guarantee every citizen the freedom of thought and speech, as well as the fact that "no one can be forced to express their opinions and beliefs or renounce them."
Henry Reznik, chairman of the Moscow Bar Association, gave a legal assessment of the officials' intentions. He stated that the inspectors, no doubt, can invite a party member for a conversation, only this citizen has every right to refuse a meeting: "A citizen is obliged to appear only if he is a witness in a criminal case. In any other case, he does not owe anything to anyone . "
According to him, local inspections of parties, as well as an exam for the "ideological commitment" of their members, mean the start of a campaign to build another vertical - this time a party one. "Everything is being done to destroy the multi-party system ," Alexei Melnikov, ex-deputy of the State Duma of three convocations, member of the Yabloko party. "We already see what happened with the executive, it remains only to wait until one party remains in Russia ," the deputy said. "Most of the questions here are connected to the "case" of law enforcement agencies ," he was surprised.
At the moment, 48 parties are registered by the Ministry of Justice. Of the bottom, no more than 7 meet the new requirements for the number of rows. This follows from the latest data presented by the Ministry of Justice on the number of parties. So, three of the parliamentary parties meet the new requirements: they are United Russia (372,000), the People's Party (120,000), the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (102,000), and four of the non-parliamentary parties: the Party of Life (81,000), the Party of the Revival of Russia ( 71 thousand), Yabloko (73 thousand) and the Russian Party of Pensioners (60 thousand). The two parties that made it into the Duma in the December 2003 elections do not yet meet the new requirements: LDPR (38,000) and Rodina (24,000). These results are even worse than those of the Agrarian Party of Russia, which failed to enter the Duma (41,000).
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